Two-thirds of disabled voters faced access difficulties at polling stations on election day. The charity Scope is calling for online voting to address the problem.
Since the 1992 General Election, disability charity Scope has run a campaign called Polls Apart, which aims to make elections more accessible to disabled voters. After voting at each General Election, disabled people are asked to complete a survey about the accessibility of their voting experience.
The Polls Apart campaign 2010 surveyed over 1,000 disabled people in constituencies throughout the UK. Researchers found that 67 per cent of polling stations had one or more significant access barriers to disabled voters. This represents just a 1 per cent improvement from the last General Election (68 per cent) and 2 per cent from the General Election of 2001 (69 per cent).
This meant that in 2010, many disabled people needed assistance to vote, and could not vote in the privacy of polling booths like other voters. Some disabled people were unable to vote at all.
Despite the widespread assumption that postal voting was the most accessible channel for disabled voters, almost half (47 per cent) of postal voters reported one or more significant problems. These ranged from the confusing and complicated instructions that accompanied the ballot to the difficulty postal voters faced in marking and folding and the paper into the small envelope provided.
One long-term solution being suggested by Scope is the introduction of online voting for disabled voters. Thirty five per cent of the disabled people surveyed in 2010 said they would like to be able to vote online.
Scope’s Ruth Scott told the BBC she supports online voting:
“In a digital age where people can vote by text for the X-Factor and shop and bank online, our voting system really needs to catch up.”
Online voting would certainly allow more disabled people to cast their votes independently and in safety, comfort and privacy.
This would also benefit non-disabled voters, and politics as a whole, as it would shorten the entire voting process. This may encourage more people to vote, particularly young, first time voters.
It is now to be hoped that the Scope report will be read by all politicians, and that serious thought will be given to allowing the option of online voting for everyone.
To reach hundreds of thousands of new readers and to make the biggest impact we can in the next general election, we need to grow our donor base substantially.
That's why in 2024, we are seeking to generate 150 additional regular donors to support Left Foot Forward's work.
We still need another 124 people to donate to hit the target. You can help. Donate today.
13 Responses to “Online voting for disabled voters”
cim
“If someone can’t get in to the voting booths, the staff should be allowed to bring the box out.”
This is already done on occasion, and it’s a very bad substitute, especially if it’s raining. People with disabilities should have the right to the same private and secure vote as everyone else. There are people who will need an assistant to help them vote even in an ideal set up, yes, but nowhere near as many as required by the current level of inaccessibility (and as the report makes clear, it’s not as if the treatment of people who do need assistants is at a good stage yet).
If you read the report it’s clearly more than just a matter of a few minor adjustments needing making, and the provision of a range of different voting methods adds to the ability of people to vote securely and privately.
Electronic (which doesn’t necessarily mean internet) voting in elections would be quite a bit harder than the X-Factor, sure, but I don’t think it’s necessarily harder than banks, who have taken a range of steps to reduce fraud in telephone and internet banking. Remember that outside Northern Ireland, you need no identification to walk into a polling station, claim to be a registered person, and cast their vote, so it’s not as if ballot box voting is immune to fraud, not to mention the various problems with household-level registration.
Mark Pack
Cim: the big different between electronic voting and banking is that in banking you know what money should be going in and out and so can check. Surprised at the balance on your statement? You can go through the list of transactions to see if a cheque was lost, direct debit taken twice by mistake etc. And mistakes do happen – which banks can then correct.
With voting (or more precisely, with secret voting) there isn’t the same ability to check because no-one knows how individuals had meant to vote. Without knowing what the correct sequence of transactions should have been you can’t correct errors in the same way as banks can and do.
That makes electronic voting a much harder and riskier process than banking.
I think the last line of the post rather misses the point – a lot of serious thought has been given to electronic voting (and a fair amount of money spent on plenty of pilots in the UK) and the conclusions are far from positive: it’s often popular with the public, but it is very costly, quite often ran into serious problems and left many security experts unconvinced.
It’s not that serious thought hasn’t been given to the issue; it has not only been thought about, it has been tested – and the results are very different from the simple ‘it’s good’ mantra.
sarah
Hi Mark,
Thanks for your comments- very useful. I didn’t realise this possibility had been thought about before. What the last line means is then that I hope that after reading the report, politicians can consider it again.
cim
Mark: Indeed – the Scope report makes various references to the 2002/3 pilots of e-voting. I used to be quite sceptical about it as well, and I agree we’re not ready for it yet, but I think in the medium-long term (which is when Scope are talking about) the difficulties could be overcome.
There are various ways to provide checks that votes cast electronically are both recorded correctly and then counted, though, that do not breach the secrecy of the vote. It’s also worth noting, if you look at some of the Scope report regarding voters with (e.g.) visual impairments, or this voter’s account that our current paper-based system provides no guarantees that votes will be recorded or counted correctly.
Mark Pack
Sarah: fair enough 🙂
Cim: Here’s an example of what can go wrong: a voting system gets wrongly configured so that votes for candidate A are recorded as votes for candidate B and vice-versa. The banking equivalent (direct debit or standing order takes money from wrong place) can be spotted (“why’s that money gone from my account?”) in a way that voting secrecy prevents for elections. Of course there should be good procedures etc. to stop this type of error, but procedures go wrong and voting secrecy means there’s less opportunity to spot such errors. Paper-based voting isn’t perfect but it doesn’t have this (extra) risk.